Ig Nobel Win for Alpine ‘Goat Man’

(BBC) – A British man who lived in the Alps as a goat for three days has won one of this year’s Ig Nobel prizes.

Tom Thwaites had special prostheses made so he could walk like an animal.

The spoof awards, which are not quite as famous as the real Nobels, were handed out during their annual ceremony at Harvard University, US.

Fascinating, if a little bizarre on occasions, was Mr Thwaites’ verdict on the whole venture. He developed a strong bond with one animal in particular – a “goat buddy”, but also very nearly kicked off a big confrontation at one point.

“I was just sort of walking around, you know chewing grass, and just looked up and then suddenly realised that everyone else had stopped chewing and there was this tension which I hadn’t kind of noticed before and then one or two of the goats started tossing their horns around and I think I was about to get in a fight,” he told BBC News.

Medicine Prize – Christoph Helmchen and colleagues, for discovering that if you have an itch on the left side of your body, you can relieve it by looking into a mirror and scratching the right side of your body (and vice versa).

Psychology Prize – Evelyne Debey and colleagues, for asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers.

Peace Prize – Gordon Pennycook and colleagues, for their scholarly study called “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit”.

Biology Prize – Awarded jointly to: Charles Foster, for living in the wild as, at different times, a badger, an otter, a deer, a fox, and a bird; and to Thomas Thwaites, for creating prosthetic extensions of his limbs that allowed him to move in the manner of, and spend time roaming hills in the company of, goats.

Literature Prize – Fredrik Sjoberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead.

Perception Prize – Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.